


Things That Go Bump in the Night

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-08
Updated: 2011-08-08
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:48:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agents Spender and Fowley don't always get along so well.<br/>Agent Fowley takes off to make trouble with Agent Mulder, leaving<br/>Jeffery to his own devices.  Jeffery takes an off-the-cuff instruction<br/>very literally.  Set during "The Beginning."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things That Go Bump in the Night

The lights in that Phoenix motel room had been flickering on and off all  
night, and the air conditioning made it too cold.  If it had been at all  
possible, he would have pushed the a/c unit out the window, let it smash  
on the parking lot pavement, and spent the rest of the night in damp-  
sheeted warmth.  He would have given nearly anything to be in Miami,  
where the air conditioners never seemed to work.  He'd spent enough  
nights there, stripped to his underwear and sprawled across the bed  
sheets with a folder of loose notes.  In an air-conditioned Phoenix  
motel room, even cockroaches would freeze to death.

Spender did, finally, manage to disable the air conditioner.  In the  
quiet the damned thing left after it shut down, the television cycled  
through news reports of Central American devastation, or Jerusalem car  
bombs.

He flipped the channels.  Cubic zirconia for sale.  The Blind Melon bee  
in her tap dance costume running sobbing through a music video.  Formula  
One racing, the rear car catching fire.  Basketball: Seattle at Dallas.    
Poorly-photographed Mexican drama-vision.  Televangelism.  Calvin Klein  
models with bones showing through their clothes.  Soviet industrial  
pornography.  Baywatch.  

The local news advised Phoenix residents that minor cooling problems at  
the nuclear plant might result in brownouts for the next ten to thirty-  
six hours.  They thanked him for his patience.

Diana was somewhere, settled into her room in the motel's other wing as  
if she couldn't get far enough away from him.  Fine.  Her company  
compared unfavourably with a room of stretched piano wire: vibrating  
tension with the hint of a threat.  Garrotted by proxy.  Let her sleep  
as far away from him as possibly.

A biography of Rita Hayworth.  Documentary footage of the Allies bombing  
Hamburg.  Kenneth Starr.  Star Trek.  Some action piece from mainland  
China, violent and complicated and badly dubbed into English.  The  
Notorious B.I.G., trenchcoated and staring ghostly into the camera.  
Sesame Street.  U2 playing in some South American city.  Hair restorers.    
Stock quotes for the now-finished financial day.  Test pattern.  Static.

Diana had laughed at him on the plane.  "You're cold, Jeff.  You've got  
New England in you like a Puritan.  God, I'm surprised you don't  
flagellate yourself for carnal thoughts."

There hadn't been anything he could say to that.  He'd just glared at  
her, eyebrows defensively low, until she went back to her notes and he  
could curse the missing file in silence.

Test pattern.  Static.  South Park.

Diana was right, as far as it went, about his Puritanism, but she  
treated it like a childishness on his part.  Her time in Germany had  
turned her into an affected European.  She enjoyed being avant-garde.    
If she believed in things beyond the pale, she seemed mostly to do it  
simply because other people didn't.  In another life, she might have  
fixated on some obscure French novelist.  In this one, she believed in  
extra-terrestrial life.  But the way she did it was ugly; her faith went  
out of its way to hurt him.

He stripped.  His clothes still smelled like the dust outside the  
nuclear station, dry and laced with diesel fuel.  The smell in his  
jacket and his hair.  The room was still cold from the air conditioning,  
making his skin twitch a little in reaction.  His narrow chest shook  
with cold and exhaustion, unflatteringly reflected in the bathroom  
mirror.  Not a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination.  He found  
it hard enough just living in his own skin.

The television went on playing in the background.

The Simpsons.  ("No child has ever messed with the Republican party and  
lived to tell about it.")  Children starving in Russia.  Overcast and  
hot until the weekend.  Rain in DC.  Scooby Doo.  Muffled commercials.

The shower water hit him like a shock, a quick orgasm, hot enough to  
leave him gasping.  It helped a little to get the dirt and the oil-smell  
off.  He still felt like the sand from the flats outside the nuclear  
plant was under his skin.

He scrubbed hard, dragging nails over his sides and shoulders,  
exfoliating by sheer will and leaving small pink trails behind.  God,  
the water was hot.  Eventually, he admitted to himself that he wasn't  
getting used to the temperature and brought it down to a bearable level.    
The skin on his shoulders smarted like a faint sunburn.  He needed to  
shave: his jaw had been blue in the mirror, and he could feel the  
beard's scrape across his palms.  It was too much effort.  He twisted  
both taps closed and towelled down in the shower stall, not wanting to  
catch one of the distorted views of his body that the fogged mirror  
would give him.

In his overnight bag he found nondescript, third-man-from-the-left, *no,  
I'm sorry officer, I can't remember what he looked like* clothes.    
Anonymous and dark.

It had been hot all day.  He'd run hours of interference for the nuclear  
plant, let in those with the proper credentials, kept the rest out.    
Nothing like the legendary X-file cases.  Everything clean and  
respectable, the paperwork in order.  That was the way civilization  
worked.  

Diana had said, "Aren't you even curious?"

He'd said, "No."  

And she'd sneered, then snarled, and finally left him in disgust,  
hauling the shoulder-strap suitcase away to her own room.  

He didn't know what she wanted from him.  Faith, maybe.  A willingness  
to believe in things that came down from the sky and ripped you out of  
your life.  Like the goblins coming to take you away.  Faith like that  
made psychopaths.  Faith like that made Mulder, frantic as a bird in a  
jar, who had screamed at him yet again at the plant perimeter, cursed  
him and threatened him, and all Spender could do to the bastard was hate  
him.

Babylon 5.  Sex call-in.  The controlled arc of a perfect golf swing.    
The price of commodities on the world exchange.  M*A*S*H.  Courtney Love  
in black mesh and vinyl.  Celebrity Skin.

In a civilized country, no one would put up with Mulder carting his  
pretty rich-boy ass all over the country at the government's expense.    
No one would listen to the paranoid delusions that spilled out tinged  
with that muffled, aristocratic coastal Massachusetts accent.  Diana  
wouldn't take Mulder's arm while he railed at God and country and lead  
him away, pet him like a nervous horse and send him off with a kiss and  
a scratch behind the ears.

Diana had said, "Go fuck yourself, Jeff."

He turned the television off.

*****

Phoenix felt different from D.C.  Away from the delicately watered  
suburbs, it was a wasteland of concrete and generica.  Fast food  
restaurants with signs half burnt-out, dry cleaning outlets closed for  
the night.  Adult video rentals.  Miles of strip malls and storefronts  
and bars in hotels.  So flat.  If he never left this place, he might  
eventually believe the world was made of dust and wind and sky.

Diana had gone.  She'd taken the Bureau car, not the one they'd rented  
at the airport, and disappeared as thoroughly as if she'd been erased.    
As if she'd been taken.  He didn't want to think about it.  Diana could  
take care of herself.  The greatest monster loose in Phoenix was a  
Vineyard-accented psychopath, and Diana seemed to be on good terms with  
him.

It really was this easy.  Even in Phoenix, a place he'd never been  
before, it was a simple matter of finding the right street, that almost  
empty one where the traffic moved a little more slowly.  A couple of  
startling-looking Native boys flashed huge eyes at the faceless surface  
of his car.  He drove past them, pulled into a strip-mall maze punctuated  
by all-night convenience stores.  A girl stepped out of the store with a  
waxed-paper cup in her hand and raked him over with her eyes.  He shook  
his head; she snorted and kept walking.

To one side of the parking lot, there was a low cinder block wall with a  
few teenagers settled against it.  Spender's still-lit headlights caught  
dark, curly hair and a slender body wrapped in jeans and a soft army-  
surplus t-shirt, green.  Pale skin for someone who lived in a place this  
hot, not particularly handsome.  Tight lips.  Spender cocked his head at  
the boy and waited.

Eventually, he came over.  A blunt-fingered hand ran over the rental-  
car's sheen.  Behind him, the convenience store lights flickered and  
dimmed for a moment.

"That's been happening all night," the boy said.  "Supposed to be some  
kind of alien monster up at the power station."

"Do you believe that?" he asked.

"No.  There're lots of monsters out tonight, but they're all human."  He  
sneered a little.

Silence.

"Looking for a date?" the boy asked finally.

Spender licked his lips.  "Yeah."

"Thirty for a blow job, fifty if I have to take it."

"Two hundred for the night."  The boy's eyes widened and he shook his  
head a little.  "What, you think you're going to find six or seven guys  
out here who want blow jobs tonight?"  Spender's was the only car in  
walking distance.  "If you don't want to, walk away."

Both short-fingered hands ran back through the boy's hair.  "I want to  
see the money."  He showed the boy the handful of twenties in his  
billfold.  "All right."

*****

He'd taken the remote control out of the boy's hand and stowed it in a  
drawer.  He didn't want to know what else the television had to say.  It  
might not even have stayed on.  The brownouts were worsening; the  
streetlights had darkened to a dirt colour on the drive back.  Spender  
hoped to God that case was going to end soon.  He wished he had the  
missing file, if only so he'd have some clue what had been happening in  
this godforsaken city.

One of the halogen lights along the access road blew out from the power  
fluctuations, making a flash of light and a sharp *pop* that was audible  
even indoors.

Spender paced around the boy, stripping him.  Pulled the thin green  
shirt over the boy's head while his arms raised and shifted as passively  
as a doll's.  The jeans dropped as soon as he released the buttons; only  
their snugness in the waist had held them on.  The narrow, softly  
haired chest shook a little under his touch.  Thin shoulders, prominent  
ribs.  The soft cock rested against dark hair at least as wiry as what  
was on the slightly bowed head.  How old?  Maybe nineteen, maybe twenty.    
Not beautiful at all, just a narrow body, a broad-nosed, ordinary face.  

Spender bent a little and kissed that dark head.  The hair smelled like  
dust.

The boy pressed back against his trousered hips and guided Spender into  
a chair.  Careful fingers unzipped him and drew his cock and balls out.    
He was still soft, but he'd only expected that.  The boy didn't  
question, just ran one faintly downy cheek along Spender's length and  
took it into his mouth.

Incredible.  That tongue wrapping around him, teasing at the head of his  
cock, making him feel the delicate lines in his own skin.  He could feel  
the boy's teeth just graze him, then pull back immediately with what  
might have been a flinch, as if he expected to be hit for the error.  As  
if he could ever hurt this one.  Spender ran his fingers through the  
boy's hair and resisted the urge to fist it.  So good.  He could feel  
throat muscles relaxing as he hardened and pushed deeper.

"Yes.  That's good, that's good."

Soft, dry fingers came up to cradle his balls and manipulate them  
gently.  The mouth withdrew from his cock and kissed him there.  Oh God,  
he wanted that body so badly.

When the boy tried to go back, Spender pushed him away gently.  "Go over  
to the bed and kneel on it.  Knees apart.  Hands on your thighs.  Good."  

He got up and came over.  The chest under his palm seemed to be nothing  
more than skin over bone, the heavy muscle all in the heart underneath  
that was beating a little too fast.  He massaged the skin, stroked the  
small, pale nipples gently and listened for a soft response.  Then slid  
a second hand down and caressed the still-soft cock between the spread  
legs.  Both of them were so dry from this heat.  The friction between  
his skin and the younger man's had to be bordering on the painful.  He  
pressed one hand to the narrow lips inches from his shoulder and groped  
with the other for lubricant and condom in the night stand.

Spender found himself soaking his hand with the lube and stroking the  
boy's cock and balls.  He kept the other hand pressed against that  
mouth.  Narrow, dark eyes widened at his touch, building something like  
a real expression as he kept stroking and massaging, wanting that thin  
body to come for him.  Soon.

When he pulled his hand away, he kissed that hard mouth before the boy  
could say anything.  Stroked the teeth with his tongue and tasted the  
inside of that mouth.  Tobacco and something sweet, like a slush drink.    
Warm body taste.  One finger slipped between the boy's ass cheeks and  
stroked the tiny, tense opening.  He kissed harder and pressed the  
finger in in.

The boy arched almost immediately as Spender found his prostate and  
rubbed at it insistently.  He whimpered when the older man worked a  
second finger in.  Against his mouth, Spender whispered, "It's OK, you  
can relax," and supported the thin body with his shoulder as the rigid  
tension drained out of it.  Stroking him front and rear, feeling the  
pleasure he was giving in the small vibrations running up the torso  
pressed against him.  He kissed a shoulder, a stretch of collarbone,  
that mouth again.

Gently, he eased the boy onto his stomach, tucked a pillow under the  
narrow hips and arranged the bent legs on either side of him.  Then  
stripped off the last of his own clothes.  The nail marks he'd left on  
himself in the shower were still there, faintly red against the white of  
his body.  The paleness of the condom made an even stronger contrast  
with those lines.  Pressed the head of his cock for a long time against  
the younger man's stretched, slicked anus, then pressed in, listening  
for small whimpers of pain or enjoyment.

He couldn't believe how tight the boy was.  So the young one didn't do  
this as often as he'd pretended.  Even lubed, Spender was sure he was  
going to hurt him; those muscles couldn't possibly relax enough to take  
him in like this.  He didn't want to hurt this boy.  Carefully, he  
lowered himself to his forearms so that his body ghosted the one under  
him and thrust, feeling for the prostate and kissing the back of that  
pale neck.  And when his partner finally whimpered *yes*, he rode him  
hard, pushing cries out of the thin body under him and thrusting as  
deeply as he could.

Whispering, "Is it good?"

"Yes."

"Tell me the truth."

"Yessss.  It's good.  Please.  Just . . . please."

He slipped a hand under them and pumped the boy's hard cock, gripping it  
hard and pulling.  Gradually, he felt the muscles around his own cock  
tighten again and the body under his whimpered and shook as it came.    
And then he could kiss that neck one more time and come too, just riding  
it out.  The body under him trembled for a long time, and what could he  
do but rock the boy back and forth and whisper into that wiry, dark  
hair?

Spender pulled out slowly, holding onto the edges of the condom, tied it  
off and threw it in the direction of the wastebasket.  Wiped his hands  
on the sheets.  The thin body against him snuggled closer than he would  
have expected, but he wasn't about to reject this unexpected softness.    
He wrapped an arm around the boy's thin shoulders and settled in beside  
him, slowly running his still-slick fingers over the gently twitching  
anus.

When the boy's breathing steadied, Spender got up and padded naked to  
the window.  Diana hadn't come back yet.  Her absence wasn't among the  
things he was prepared to worry about at the moment.  He went into the  
bathroom.  The air was finally warm enough to suit him.  He needed this  
heat, needed the dampness that came with it.  He ran hot water in the  
sink and splashed himself off.

Pale arms came around him from behind and he found the boy resting  
gently against his shoulder.  Dark eyes stared curiously at their  
reflection, then at Spender.

The boy said, "I look like you."

He did.  They had the same face: pale, rough skin, broad-nosed and thin-  
lipped.  Dark, curly hair on both of them.  Narrow bodies.  The same  
hands.  Only the difference in their ages, maybe twelve years,  
distinguished them.  It was a similarity close enough to be frightening.

Spender turned and pulled the boy close against him.  "Yeah, you do."    
Kissed the boy's temple and rocked him gently against his chest.

He washed the boy's body down with a cloth and water from the sink,  
appreciating its lines, comforting the other as he couldn't comfort  
himself.  Kissing a poorly-padded hipbone, the back of a knee.    
Eventually, he wrapped both arms around the younger man's shoulders and  
sleep-walked him back to bed.

His mother, the last time he had seen her, had looked a little like  
that.  Tired and glittering at the same time.  She believed, the way  
Agent Mulder did.  The way that made her vanish again, dead or kidnapped  
or somehow wandering insane through the Blue Ridge mountains where  
they'd found the bodies.  He'd looked for her that day, all and that  
week.  The earth might as well have opened and swallowed her up.  Eaten  
by monsters.  Taken by bears.  Abducted by aliens.  Her faith had erased  
her, as if her belief in monsters had made them real.  If he managed to  
believe the way she had, just for a few minutes, they'd take him too.

He laid beside the boy's narrow body and rubbed the faintly damp back in  
small circles.  Even in the almost nonexistent light, he could see every  
small flaw in the boy's skin.  A small, pleasured murmur escaped the  
face pressed against the pillow and the boy snuggled closer against him.

Diana didn't know the first goddamned thing about self-flagellation.    
The suffering she envisioned was messy, over-emotional and demanding a  
forgiveness that he'd long ago ceased to count on.  He would have loved  
to show her this scene.  He would have loved to see her trying to  
understand that hurting himself also involved comforting himself.

Diana had said, "Go fuck yourself, Jeff."

Spender found the remote control in the night stand and flipped the  
television on.  CNN flickered, listing natural disasters and political  
events taking place on the other side of the world, where it was  
morning.  A series of kidnappings in Texas and Louisiana.  The apology  
of the power company continued to scroll across the bottom of the  
screen, not always visible when the power flickered.

The brownouts continued.


End file.
